Saturday, 30 March 2013

Chikyuu Sentai Fiveman 07 – The 45m Elementary School Student

This episode in a nutshell.

A 45 meter tall alien elementary school student is having a rampage because Dorongos paid him to do that! As it turns out, the alien elementary school student is bad in math that is why he agreed with Dorongos' proposal. With that in mind, Kasumi, who happens to be a math teacher, teaches the alien!


For the past few episodes, the younger Hoshikawa sibling Remi has a lot of focus episodes. It's quite refreshing to see Kasumi in the spotlight for once. Her dedication to teach the alien student reminded us that the Fivemen are a group of sibling heroes who just happen to be teachers, something this show tries to hide for some reason. Aside from having Kasumi in the spotlight, this episode also reminded us that Fumiya knows a lot of languages and serves as the translator for both Kasumi and Saira Gin aka the giant elementary school student. It's kinda cool to listen to Fumiya blabbing nonsense but for some reason, his words make sense to the alien.

As for how Kasumi taught the alien, at first she tried to do the traditional way of teaching with the help of giant pencils, she ended up teaching the alien student a rather non-traditional way thanks to enemy fighter planes charging them and a Gorlin. Before talking about the fighter plane math, let's talk about the Gorlin. What's surprising is that the Gorlin can actually absorb living organic matter! For the past episodes, we keep on seeing it absorbing dead MOTWs, but this episode shed some light that the Gorlin can do more than just that, it can actually absorb giant aliens if it is ordered to do so.


Because it is trying to absorb a living organism, of course, it will take some time for the cellular absorption scene to happen. But once it happens, we see the difference between absorbing a dead MOTW and a living creature. Absorbing a living creature takes a lot of time, especially if the organism doesn't want to get absorbed. Thankfully, the Fivemen formed the Five Robo just in time to stop the absorption process. Now comes the fun part of the episode, Elementary Math with Ms. Kasumi Hoshikawa.

Though the scene kinda looks a bit cheesy, I just love that they need to shoot enemy fighter planes to teach the young Saira Gin addition and subtraction. It's kinda cute to see a giant alien struggling with his math. At the end, he was able to understand math better thanks to Kasumi's really fun way of teaching it. And thus, the alien leaves the planet now with a mark on his nail, the same way teachers stamp a star on a kid once he did well in class. Hopefully, we will see more of these teacher-student episodes in the series, because I think, this is one of the show's strongest points.